Burke Stodger

[Joseph Tracy]

Burke Stodger- The name implies a conservative eater or server of  
heavy unpalatable fare ( stodge) with a counterrevolutionary( Edmund  
Burke) stance.
Clyde Burke  is also one of the agents of The Shadow (identified with  
Pierce Inverarity in COL 49)

The character Burke Stodger  seems an amalgam of actors who named  
names to HUAC in order to avoid blacklisting: possibly George Murphy  
whose last movie was a red scare spy movie, Lee J Cobb who first  
resisted the pressures of the committee than succumbed or Larry Parks 
( same as Cobb). George Murphy was the most active anti-communist who  
Reagan once referred to as "...my John the Baptist."
In Burke Stodger’s world even his dog Addison aspires to be an actor  
with his imitation of George Sanders’ arched eyebrow. This focus on  
Actors and Movies being a powerful political force that inspires  
fascist repression is a repeated theme in IV Vineland,  COL 49 and to  
some degree GR.
There is also a Howard Hughes connection here.  Because of the HUAC  
actions, RKO pictures went into the hands of Howard Hughes in May  
1948, Hughes fired most of RKO's employees and virtually shut the  
studio down for half a year as he had the political sympathies of the  
rest investigated. The implications of Hughes secret political  
activities expands if he is behind the real world versions of   
Vigilant California.
  There is a lot of recruiting  going on in this  novel and the  
contemporary  recruiting of  the Army, Blackwater and CIA etc. may be  
part of the scope of interest of the noveln and an interest recurrent  
in all Pynchon books. Burke sends Coy to Vigilant California and I  
want to point to a particularly weird organization, but well  
documented by the FBI, who reminds me of Vigilant California along  
with the Minutemen and John Birch Society which was called the Secret  
Army Organization formed in 1970.

I will send an  excerpt about the SAO in a separate post.
Included in the operations of the SAO were the FBI, Donald Segretti,  
that famous republican dirty tricks operator, and G Gordon LIddy of  
the  Plumbers/ Watergate fame, and interestingly a fellow named   
Mickey Hoover, prolly a coincidence..

The point of all this seems to be that the spirit of fascism is not a  
neutralized force but a  high pressure anti-democratic energy  
resulting naturally from interactions between  large , self serving  
organizations , particularly those with authoritarian structures.   
Everything is a battleground: the arts, sex, loyalty to friends,the  
ecosystems that sustain life, the ability to find work, the money of  
the successful, the food we eat, the substances we enjoy, and  the  
agencies of justice and law. With Doc and Bigfoot and Coy  we see  
that even the desire to serve justice and catch and stop the  
criminals is easily turned to serve the criminals.